Print Lair of the Beasts: Wolves vs. Werewolves

In the early part of 2006, my wife, Dana, and I returned to England for six months; and it was while we were back in my home-country that I investigated a number of sightings of strange animals that had a distinct werewolf-flavor to them.

“Nick? It’s Paul Foster,” said the gravelly, early-morning voice at the other end of the telephone. “Remember me?”

I most certainly did. Paul was someone who hung around the UFO scene in the mid-to-late 1990s in central England, and who I regularly saw at conferences and lectures at a local level.

“Yeah,” I replied, while taking a big swig of hot tea and munching on a breakfast of two slices of thickly buttered toast.

“What do you think about this new story about a wolf near the Cannock Chase?” asked Paul.

Statements like that are always guaranteed to grab my attention: the Cannock Chase is a large area of woodland near to where I used to live, and which has been the site of numerous close encounters with weird, unidentified beasts.

“A wolf? What’s happened?” I asked, eagerly, if not more than a little bit surprised, too.

Early on the morning of June 28, 2006 motorists on Junction 10A of the M6 Motorway near to the Cannock Chase had jammed Highways Agency telephone-lines with wild reports of a “wolf-like creature” that was seen “racing between lanes at rush hour.”

Dumbfounded motorists stared with utter disbelief as the giant beast, described as being “greyish-black” in color, sped between lanes, skilfully dodging cars, trucks and motorbikes, before diving for cover in the nearby trees.

Press coverage demonstrated that Highways Agency staff took the reports very seriously indeed, but came to the sober conclusion that the animal was “probably a husky dog.”

However, a spokesperson for Saga Radio, the first media outlet on the scene, said in reply to the statement of the Highways Agency: “Everyone who saw it is convinced it was something more than a domestic dog. I know it sounds crazy but these people think they’ve seen a wolf.”

The Chase Post newspaper, by now ever-quick to report on mystery animals seen in the vicinity of the town of Cannock and the surrounding woods, went into a condition of overwhelming excitement and stated on July 6 in an article titled Great Beast Debate on Net that: “Internet message boards are being flooded with debates on our front-page revelation last week that a ‘wolf-like’ creature was spotted by dozens of motorists on the M6 hard-shoulder.”

The Post further noted: “Our own website has been thrown into overdrive by the story, which received around 2,600 hits from fans of the unexplained across the globe in the last week alone.”

While the affair was never ultimately resolved to everyone’s satisfaction, the final, carefully-worded statement went to a spokesperson of the Highways Agency, who said: “We have received a number of reports that the animal was captured. But we don’t know where, who by, or what it was.” Indeed.

The following account - that may perhaps have been of some relevancy - also reached me as I sought out the truth about the Cannock wolves:

“I’m from Wolverhampton [a town only a few miles from Cannock]; although I remember in my youth - as I mostly spent it over on the railway lines, as there was a kind of a forest and banks to make dens in on the other side - there was this time in the late eighties.

“It was around two weeks before Christmas. I was with friends and we saw a dog in the distance that looked like a ghost. Its pupils were moon-white. I thought it might be a white fox or a husky but walking closer to it, I could clearly see it wasn’t. Its build was rough and dirty too, and it didn’t look so happy either.

“It was continuously looking at us and we all started to sense a fear; then it moved suddenly and we ran for our lives home. I was later convinced it was a wolf. I never knew they were extinct at the time, so I can see how it must have sounded when I was telling my parents about it. But it wasn’t someone’s pet, that’s for sure.”

But far stranger things were to come: in late June 2006, a man named Jim Broadhurst telephoned me to say that while walking with his wife across the Cannock Chase four days earlier, they had seen at a distance of about one hundred and fifty feet, what looked like a large wolf striding purposefully through the dense woods.

Broadhurst said that utter terror gripped both of them when the creature suddenly stopped and looked intently, and menacingly even, in their direction. That terror was amplified to truly stratospheric levels, however, when the beast reportedly, and incredibly, reared up onto its muscular hind legs and backed away into the trees, never to be seen again.

Sightings of the strange beast continued right into the middle-part of 2007. Since then, the reports appear to have come to an end. Unless, that is, you know better…

Nick Redfern is the author of many books on unsolved mysteries, including There’s something in the Woods; Strange Secrets; and the forthcoming Science Fiction Secrets.

Lair of the Beasts: Wolves vs. Werewolves (Mania.com)